A few month ago, I was in a 1-year school of art where I attended a comic course. The goal was to make a whole story and afterwards produce at least three finished pages. It started as a story inspired by Winsor McCay. You see a boy sleeping in his bed. Later a goblin from a movie/fantasy-poster comes alive and leaves it's flat existence to take the boy into adventures. This journey begins with that the legs of the bed grows (by saw them off!?!) and the bed's breaking through the roof, where other goblins comes and transform it into a car. But then the troubles just begins...
I think the most interesting was I learned was how you could handle time. First my whole story was told in three pages. The viewpoint was always constant and the elapsed time from panel to panel was rather big. My teacher challenged my to put more personality and character into the story by using more dynamic perspectives and character close-ups. Since I didn't do any reseaches the characters and environment are pretty uninspired boring and sometimes even wrong. But the new approach had lead to a different speed. Now on three pages I could only display how the goblin comes out of his poster, whereas in the other style I told a whole story i three pages! Very interesting for me. But to be honest, I like the old approach (McCay's) for this kind of story more, because it's more about the adventure itself and not about the character feelings (which I had no idea how to express).
About the technique. First I wanted to do it completely digital, but my digital line quality is completely for the arse, thus I wanted to draw it analog and then color it digitaly (Studio Ghibli style). But two weeks before deadline (when I just had scribbles and not even begun final penciling) my Laptop died so I went for a classic black&white approach. I think it's very interesting how you could descripe volumes just with two values and I thought back then I did a fairly good job. But seeing it now I have the feeling it could be pushed much more... and the lineweight is just ugly thin.
Nevertheless a good experience.